Posts by Captain Underpants

Capita IT Services staff plan strike over pay this Friday

@Lost All Faith...

It's a problem with the management's decision on how to deal with unionised staff, actually.

They know there's a union there. They know that a 1.1% raise is an insult and a real-terms pay cut, and to make things worse they also publicly give themselves a paycut.

The customer doesn't want to see the degradation of service that will happen when the staff who actually do the work bail out permanently. The 1-day strike option is a way of showing what that would be like for a short period of time, in an effort to get clients to nag management and essentially tell them to Stop Dicking The Staff Around.

Sure, some unions take the piss, but at the moment it's practically the golden rule for management to take the piss as well. In the business world, a peaceful protest will be less use than a chocolate teapot. Either you do something that has an impact forcing a response (good or bad), or you effectively accept what you're being offered.

ISPs: Relax. Blocking porn online won't really work

Re: Job title

@TrishaD:

Unfortunately, being good most of the time at stuff that only your local constituents ever notice or have reason to care about, while also deciding that your total ignorance in a given area is no obstacle to imposing your views on those who work in that area, means that the vast majority of people will take one look at you and say "So who is this person and why did they decide that Olympic Gold Medallist In The Field Of Bellendery was their life's calling?".

And, frankly, it's kind of deserved. Especially when she's pulling "Think Of The Children" crap on us. If she really wants to help better look after the children in the UK, she'd be pushing for much greater support and education of parents re: effective parenting techniques, and (if she wanted to go Full-on Pants On Head Mental) probably mandating much greater amounts of profiling and pre-natal education for prospective parents, with a Licence To Sprog (with attendant bureaucracy similar to that which adopting parents go through) as the endgame.

But instead, she and Cameron are going for the low hanging fruit of giving the Mumsnet Moron Brigade (Proud Home Of Those Who Don't Let Ignorance Get In The Way Of Having An Opinion since 2000!) what they keep asking for, even though they barely understand what the problem is, never mind what available options might have any impact whatsoever in terms of solving it.

Tl, dr;

Nuts to her, she can reap what she sows in much the same way as Paul Chambers had to over the course of several years. It's about time someone in UK.gov got to feel the full pants-on-head mental state of current UK law in relation to the internet; it's probably the only way to make them understand.

Articles with no comments

Re: Oh look...

@Daniel

I find that Lewis writing about military hardware is a fascinating and knowledgable (at least as far as I can tell) individual with interesting insights to share.

Lewis writing about anything relating to energy or climate, however, appears to be an anti-green evangelist looking for any excuse, no matter how contrived or factually inaccurate, to try and smack everyone even remotely connected to green initiatives. He's clearly passionate about the issue and has his own opinions, but he's so far away from objectivity on the subject that it really is hard to find any reason to read his articles a lot of the time, especially when he's misinterpreting scientific publications...

But yeah, an Orlowski phase sounds about right. Which is a shame, Orlowski with comments on and the right topic can produce some great articles and discussions, but Orlowski with comments off tends to be clickbait and/or effectively trolling his own audience.

Re: Oh look...

@Graham Marsden:

Lewis Page? The chap who has at least once written an article he claimed was supported by a scientific paper that explicitly contradicted what he was saying? Surely not!

As far as the more general thread goes: I agree. If Vulture Central wants us using the forums, make 'em worthwhile and relevant - ie set up an automated bridge between the "comment" link at the foot of the article and a new thread, created automatically on the forum, which contains either the entire article or at least the first two paragraphs and a link to it on the main site. Make it as easy to comment on the forum as it currently is on the front page. And don't use restricting an existing facility as an "incentive", because all you do is irritate people by foisting something they can't be arsed with for no obvious reason.

US gov SMASHES UP TVs and MICE to nuke tiny malware outbreak

Re: WOW !

@malle-herbert:

The sad thing is, there is a limited case to be made for scrutinising HIDs as possible malware vectors or security concerns (see for example this story from a couple of years ago).

I don't for one second believe that the idiots responsible for this could even spell HID, though, much less explain why you'd need to check whether they were possible attack vectors...

'The Apprentice' is a load of old codswallop, says biz prof

Re: And it's taken how long to notice this?

@Anonymous Custard:

Well, if you're going to assume that the spouse should have no ambition beyond sitting around at home alternating between Raising The Kids and Cleaning The Home (with occasional forays into Spending Your Hard Earned Cash, Grumble Grumble) then yeah, I guess you might run into trouble. That doesn't mean it's how everyone does it.

@Lallabalalla:

Retiring at 35 to arse about on a beach is all very well, but the shortening of your life expectancy resulting from the kind of stress usually involved in the relatively few jobs that can actually pay that well will mean you're not necessarily doing well compared to those who decide that Loads Of Cash + Early Retirement isn't the goal. Horses for courses, of course, but there's no one right answer that applies to everyone...

Brits' HSBC bank cards, net access goes TITSUP

Re: Less than ideal

@g e

I sympathise (not least because I'm with HSBC too and have seen the flakiness of their normally-robust online service today) but, playing Devil's Advocate with your choice of title, I don't think there's ever a good point for banks to be out of service or offline, is there?

This sort of thing neatly demonstrates the most compelling argument to be made in favour of keeping some cash about your person, IMO. Cash has a number of problems, but "sorry, your bank is currently unavailable" is not one of them!

We want to put a KILL SWITCH into your PHONE, say Feds

Quite aside from the obvious "what a remarkably shoddy idea that provides the end user with nothing they need, while providing operators and government bodies with convenient new powers" comment, I'd like to highlight the following:

"The purpose of stealing the handset and then discarding it is to delay pursuers, thus providing more time during which stolen credit cards and other spoils can be turned into cash."

Is there a basis for this statement, or a citation from the police? Because on the face of it, it sounds like nonsense to me - if my wallet and phone are nicked, I'm cancelling the cards ASAP regardless of whether I think there's a chance of getting the phone back.

The reason I say this is that I also call Great Big Hairy Nadgers on your assertion that thieves don't want the phone when mugging someone. A new iPhone 5 or equivalent-level smartphone, unlocked, costs around £500. You're smoking something fun if you think muggers and thieves don't want in on that action, even if the resale value of a hot one is only a fraction of the full retail price.

BBC's Digital Moneypit Initiative known to be 'pile of dung' for years

Oh, is it time for another "SCRAP THE BEEB! DOWN WITH THE LICENCE FEE! LET THE MARKET DECIDE!" thread already?

On the one hand - *facepalm* says it all, really. Textbook project management fuckuperry of the highest order.

On the other hand - if you can't see the potential benefits of an organisation-wide system to allow production teams to share their footage and material, you've not engaged your brain. The Beeb, as with any sufficiently large organisation, has the twin problems of first usefully storing all the masses of information generated by its various teams and departments and secondly making sure that it's indexed documented in such a way that individuals can discover the existence of and then request/gain access to relevant material.

It's possible that this problem has already been solved elsewhere, but I'm not aware of that being the case. And that's important - given the way that the Beeb's iPlayer project was what led the way to the UK's TV channels providing streaming access, we shouldn't just assume that any big BBC project is a guaranteed waste of time and money.

Thus far, it sounds like DMI was, in practice, a total balls-up. That doesn't mean the goals weren't worthwhile, or that they won't have produced some useful bits and pieces along the way. In a way it would be quite impressive to spend £100M on a project that yielded nothing of any use whatsoever.

David Cameron asks UK biz to pay their low, low taxes

Re: Cunning Stunts

@ Brewster's Angle Grinder:

There are still possibilities, though:

How about implementing a maximum amount that can be claimed as a cost by a UK PLC as an "asset use charge" for IP such as names etc and set it at some low percentage of total revenue, then disregard any additional costs submitted by the company when calculating tax liability? Better yet, set that maximum amount as a % of profits declared in the UK? Ie if you want to be able to funnel out £5M as a cost, you have to have declared a profit of £50M (and paid tax on it).

Or placing an onerous burden of proof re: competitive tendering process for supplier choice (to be reviewed by independent auditors) when eg Starbucks claim they have to use Starbucks beans bought at a 5 Gajillion% markup compared to every other suppier, and where such proof is lacking only accept a cost declaration set by the average cost of said supplies from eg the top 5 suppliers per volume, and ignore any additional costs when calculating tax liability. It doesn't eliminate the problem, but it makes it cost them more to do it, and eventually the cost-benefit analysis will tip the other way.

For product-based companies in particular like Starbucks and Apple, the claim that they have to pay themselves for use of said assets is clearly bollocks. There's no actual business requirement for it, it's an accounting convenience. So limit the accounting benefit from letting them do it. No actual business model will operate in such a way that all possible profit margin is eaten by a cost to an exclusive supplier; if there's no *actual* profit, there's no reason to continue operating.

Alternatively, pass legislation whereby leaking corporate tax arrangements is permissible under law - and so is eg tasering company executives for approving such measures. (Just kidding, though it strikes me that a BOFH-like solution would be more effective in achieving changed behaviour...)

'No discernible increase in piracy' from DRM-free e-books

Re: No surprise here - It is DRM that increases piracy

@lurker:

Hmm, I should've chosen my words more carefully. I didn't mean to suggest that there's absolute parity end-to-end between ebooks and printed books, necessarily - I was trying to suggest that it's a fallacy to think "Ebook = no production costs, physical book = enormous production costs". Ebooks increase the workload for layout and platform proofing. I referenced Stross because his article is the best expression of the number of things done by a publisher as part of publishing a book that don't involve either the book being written or the words being put onto paper; the vast majority of those things apply regardless of format.

It's also relevant to mention that while I happen to know a bit about self-publishing and small press, I generally defer to people working full-time in the field when it comes to what is or is not true about that field.

@ Mojojojo:

I'm not sure you can ignore 16 and 17 For "shipping", you can substitute "file hosting & distribution", and for "invoicing and accounting" you can substitute...errr... "invoicing and accounting". Unless you are exclusively selling your ebook through your own channel (which reduces your reach substantially), you'll be dealing with partners. Ergo invoicing & accounting.

(You may be interested in CMAP #9: Ebooks, incidentally - not least for Stross's prediction that ebooks will end up replacing mass market paperbacks. A prediction that I don't like but suspect is going to be correct.)

@K

I'm not convinced that your volume argument is entirely correct - it assumes that there are no per-transaction costs, for starters, which is generally not the case. On top of which, there's no guarantee that simply cutting the per-item revenue (presumably by slashing the "profit" bit) the total number of item sales will increase enough to keep total revenue standard, never mind increase it. There's so much content out there that price alone isn't the main determinant, especially when you talk about material in which you the reader may be interested, but of which you aren't aware - because the solution to that is marketing (either word-of-mouth which takes ages or the traditional kind which takes money).

I do agree that book publishers want to get reader's loyalty, which is why they tend to want to retain first refusal rights to a given author's next book.

It's worth noting that some publishers are still doing very limited edition high-cost items (eg small runs of individually-numbered signed books, and even smaller runs of individually-lettered signed books - I heard about this when reading about China Mieville's books, but I'm sure he's not the only one). As with the music industry, I suspect that the way to go is to use different formats to target different audiences. (Why turn down the extra money to be made from rich fans who want a unique physical artefact just because casual readers want a cheap ebook, when you can do both?)

Re: No surprise here - It is DRM that increases piracy

As one who held this same opinion for a long time, I feel compelled to link you to the relevant Charlie Stross Common Misconceptions About Publishing article.

The only way ebooks are cheaper is if they are an afterthought to the printed publication and therefore can be considered, as a format, to have no inherent sunk costs of their own. But that's simply not true, partly because format testing for the variety of devices and platforms out there brings proofing and layout costs to the e-edition, and partly because every publisher who wants to stay in business these days has to include ebook sales into their total sales projections.

Note that I'm not arguing for price parity here; but reading Stross's article and talking to some friends who work in publishing has convinced me that the case for ebooks being vastly cheaper than printed books requires either special circumstances or wonky financials.

That said, I wish more publishers would do an O'Reilly on it and provide a bundle option at a marginal increase on the print edition price; I can see the value in both formats, and don't object to paying more for receiving a book in both formats to save me either printing out a digital copy or scanning in a paper one - but the pricing has to be better than "want both formats? buy two copies". Especially if DRM nonsense will be involved on the ebook side.

Microsoft: All RIGHT, you can have your Start button back

Not being funny, but as with every other blog out there, I haven't seen any actual statement from MS that Blue is going to bring back the Start button.

Is it a case of a click-baiting headline, or have I missed something from the article itself?

Quid-a-day nosh challenge hack enters the final furlong

Re: Such as shame

Wipe? If he's very lucky he'll be in circumstances that allow for merely wiping to be appropriate.

My guess is that the poor bugger's gonna need a bucket and a hose, and possibly some wire wool, once his diet returns to some normality.

Still, it's all for a good cause, right? And he'll be able to walk normally (and sit down without wincing) after a few days...

(I'm sure I'm not helping here :D)

Weary quid-a-day nosh hack fears colonal mass ejection

A prize of some sort is due for "colonal mass ejection".

Though from what you say about rumblings and imminent bowel explosions, I suspect you may be put off brown sauce for a while come Saturday...

Hotel marketplace Airbnb: Show us your privates if you want to book a bed

HAH! Yeah, err, no thanks.

They can go and jump. And not just for the passport stuff but for the social network crap too. I don't see any reason for them to have either bit of info, and in particular deciding that they will simply require those of us living in countries with strongaer-than-the-US data protection laws to go along with their half-assed crap is a great way to get themselves consigned to the dustbin of history.

Given how much grief you effectively doom yourself to for the rest of your life for having a single instance of passport theft (be it physical theft or duplication/identity theft), the risks involved in letting some shower of twits with no guaranteed ability to provide a good level of security for the information they're demanding far outweigh any benefit likely to arise from doing business with them.

Nick Clegg: Snooper's Charter 'isn't going to happen'

@Miek - he's more commonly known as Waylon Smithers these days...

Inside Secure snatches BBC iPlayer downloads from Adobe

Re: @Captain Underpants

@Neil - yes, fine, owned by The Crown and run for the public. However, in the context of the currently-fashionable instance of constitutional monarchy that ostensibly runs the UK, there's not really any difference between that and being state-owned - at least not that I can tell. (Well, aside from the fact that other state owned broadcasters tend not to be of the same calibre as the Beeb, but I think that's more a fluke than down to something special about the nature of The Crown as a corporate holder...).

Re: BBC Android developers are incompetent.

@Steve:

From the UK TV Licencing Terms & Conditions page:

"To use any TV equipment to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on television.

This includes watching or recording streamed services and satellite TV broadcast from outside the UK. If you only watch on-demand services, then you don't need a licence." (My emphasis).

For my next trick, I shall explain how to convince the licencing people that my nice Sharp screen is in fact a monitor only receiving video input from my HTPC and definitely not a television, no matter what it says on the box...

@Worm

Think human, not technical - ie it's more a question of "What does the boss/account manager/MD/CEO use?" rather than "What's easier to develop for?".

Questions of cross platform support are greatly exaggerated, but given that iPlayer doesn't need to be as complex as eg some games - since it's just piping in video - the excuses ralating to different android handsets & versions have had the whiff of food after bovine digestion for at least 12 months now...

Re: What's the point of DRM?

The deciders are the content providers, not the platform providers. And the logic is usually "if you make it straightforward to grab the file for free from a stream/broadcast, you'll seriously damage your future ability to then sell access to the same content on disk - or charge other networks/foreign broadcasters for the rights to do the same".

If you make it unDRM'd on phones, you'd effectively be making it unDRM'd on all platforms. Which I agree would be a nice thing to have, but in the context of current financial models this is viewed as absolutely unthinkable by content owners (and the Beeb gets to have the fun of trying to rationalise the schizophrenic position of being a content creator/owner who's also a content distributor for third party creators who is also also state-owned and therefore has a different mandate to that enjoyed by standard commercial operators").

Re: It's a good job there aren't scripts to download iplayer streams.

@AC 15:31:

The de facto ability to do something doesn't negate the desirability of an official, supported way of doing the same thing.

As for "We focus on iOS because of the challenge of supporting multiple Android devices" in the article... yeah, right. As with most other areas, I bet it's more like "The boss, and his boss, and his boss's boss, use iPhones. So you're going to do work that looks useful to them, and we can worry about porting it to that Android thing later, once we're sure they won't shitcan us to save money."

P2P badboys The Pirate Bay kicked out of Greenland: Took under 48 hours

Re: why is it illegal?

@Rukario

Yeah, I noticed that the first time. I'm not personally convinced, though, because it's applied across the board and provides no exemption mechanism for those whose usage does not match the criteria. Hence, if it's a legislatively-mandated cost to be included in the price of all such items, it's no different in my mind to sales tax/VAT. (The more cynically minded might argue that the fact that the money gets funneled to a body who then pisses it away in a manner that most of its intended beneficiaries don't much like is yet another similarity to an actual tax...)

The difference between a tax and a levy in semantic terms is irrelevant, in any case - the key fact here is that if you buy storage media, you are paying a per-amount-of-storage-space charge to a body which compensates musicians for the transcoding of their music that you are assumed to do, whether or not you do it. At which point, screw 'em. If they're allowed to pre-emptively charge you for something you may do just by virtue of buying hardware, then the same sort of logic legitimises users pre-emptively snaffling naughty free copies of $BAND's new album before deciding to pay for it or not, because apparently we're reversing the usual order of the payment | product handover process in retail transactions...

Re: Bah!

You're right to ask for numbers, but I'd also like to point out that there is a non-trivial amount of legitimately freely redistributed content out there in torrent form. I'm not going to argue that it's more popular than $USBILLBOARD#1ALBUM or $TENTPOLEHOLLYWOODBLOCKBUSTER, but it's certainly there.

There are also commercial operations using closed trackers to distribute their software.

There is also the ever-present warez issue of files being deliberately misnamed (as has happened not only by malware or dodgy smut merchants, but also with "poisoned" files released by record labels).

So without a clear and quite labour-intensive methodology (which will need to include some sort of anonymised data access to a large number of ISPs, as well as permission to retrieve and inventory every torrent identified from the anonymised ISP data, as well as some sort of magic to identify when non-free material is being legitimately torrented) there's no useful way of reaching any conclusion.

(I should clarify - this applies to the overall superset of torrent trackers; I suspect that the number of legitimate torrents on TPB is rather low as a proportion of the total number of torrents...)

Re: why is it illegal?

@Chad

Well, I guess it can be argued that with TPB in particular there's a specific focus.

But generally, with torrent trackers, unless they're focusing on specific media and stopping people submitting legitimately free material as torrents, that's not necessarily the case.

It's going to be interesting to see how Google treat trackers in future, given that the emergence of Google Play (or should I say re-emergence of Google Video?) means that they now find themselves with conflicting interests, since taking the AdWords money from torrent trackers may well mean depriving themselves of film rental/sale revenue through Google Play...

Re: why is it illegal?

I have to say I don't love the idea that buying a CD and having the temerity to transcode it to a format that can be used by the only audio-playing equipment that I own should involve me paying an additional levy. Especially not since buying the storage media involves paying the levy even if you only ever buy digital downloads:ie where the payment you've made for the song already accounts for it being a digital file.

So no, they can screw off, it's a tax. If it's applied across all storage media sales (ie there's no way for me to say "I won't be storing any transcoded media on this device, therefore I am exempt from the levy) then I don't see how they can argue otherwise.

Re: craz.ie

@m a d r a:

No, see, you're missing the point. Being excessively expensive and restrictive is a way of denoting the domain's exclusivity. Because we all know that when you think Internet, you think dot-ie. Never mind those tacky dotcoms, I heard anyone can have one of them for a tenner or less! Truly the filthy floozies of the internet world. Dot-ies, now - they've got standards. And class. And definitely aren't just yours because you had the money to spend.

(Don't forget the rule about how you won't get a .ie domain if you want to serve up smut! Because we all know that Ireland is a smut-free country. Yep. Definitely. *cough*)

It occurs to me that de Valera would likely approve of the nonsensical policies governing the sale & administration of the .ie domain. Which, if you know anything much about the man's policies and legacy, says about all that needs to be said...

Re: why is it illegal?

@Alan

That's not the point. The point is that the levy is applied to storage media, and the legislature describing it states that compensating artists is the rationale.

The fact that the levy is incompetently administered does not reduce the potential problem of treating as criminal an activity for whose repercussions you are imposing a tax.

Re: why is it illegal?

@Chad

I'm not sure that applies across the board - besides, if it were true, it would equally apply to every search engine ever made publicly accessible and probably every computer-based comms technology ever made.

Newsgroups are still going strong and, barring Newzbin, haven't been persecuted for being an easy way to get warez. I've never heard of an IRC server being chased over warez/piracy issues even though that's another fine long-standing avenue for naughtiness.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent is a fantastically useful protocol for anyone who wants/needs to distribute large files without bleeding money for hosting, which means that it gets used for both lawful and unlawful uses. (I saw "lawful" because the "illegal" aspect of torrenting is based on the "oooooh, that's redistribution, therefore we'll treat people running torrent clients in the exact same way as we would someone mass-producing knock-off DVDs that they sell for a fiver down the pub".)

I have a whole bunch of torrents that I regularly seed at home - many of them are legitimately free films ferom the likes of vodo.net; others are legitimately free software packages or game mods; others are non-free but private-tracker torrents for things like Humble Bundle game packs (as in, the torrents are made available by the Humble Bundle founders and I seed them to try and help HB keep their bandwidth costs down).

The fact that naughty material is available as a torrent doesn't mean that all torrents are naughty or that the existence of torrents predisposes people to be naughty. If anything was going to predispose people to be naughty, it would be the access they have to a networked machine that's very good at making copies of information structures....

It's also worth noting that in certain countries, taxes are levied on storage media that are directly paid to performing artists collection bodies as "compensation" for piracy (Canada & Spain, for example). How easy is it to argue that an action is illegal if the state has already imposed a tax on you which asserts that you will commit the action and charges you accordingly?

@robert cooke

Ah, .ie domain registrations, where the high cost is justified on the grounds of exclusivity and the reasons you'd want to get one offered are "well, it shows you're doing business in Ireland". It's almost as though .ie domains are being managed by people who don't have the faintest understanding of the technology involved...no, wait, it's exactly like that.

Moist iPhone fanbois tempted with golden Apple shower offer

And here was me thinking that the solution to this issue was the long-standing "get a long thin rod, put a small blob of whiteout on it, and very gently pop it down the headphone jack to cover the offending pinkness"...

'You can keep it' - Brit's nicked laptop turns up on Iranians' sofa

Re: White whines: Muh New Overpriced Shiny was a stolen!

From what I've seen of other similar software, it can configure the camera to take snapshots at regular intervals and upload them to a predetermined location. It also seeks out any available networks (either private ones to which access is provided, or public networks) for uploading info.

So yes, it depends on network access being available, but given the likelihood of such equipment being reused after the theft, it's not a terrible idea. Worst case scenario, your stolen shiny remains stolen.

Re: Wow - quicker than you can say "judgemental"

Well, that's the rub, isn't it?

On the one hand, if it was nicked it was probably stolen for a fair bit less than brand new pricing (though still more than a nicked laptop without a glowing fruit on the back). So there'd probably be an element of "This is surprisingly cheap" at play.

On the other hand, we don't know whether they bought straight from someone wearing a balaclava, black & white stripey jumper who was carrying the MBP in a burlap sack with "SWAG" written on it, or whether they bought it from the nth person in a chain with only the first person involved having direct contact with the thief.

Still handling stolen goods, I suppose, but not to the same extent.

Dinosaur embryos FOUND: Resurrection 'out of the question'* - boffin

There's a good article in the April issue of National Geographic about the current state of play of the technology involved in cloning extinct species, and as I understand it the current approach is to pick a similar species, modify individuals of that species so that their genetic payload corresponds to that of the species you want to breed, then have them mate. The idea is that it's possible to create certain gene sequences and implant them as required, but you need a suitable recipient for the idea to work.

Apparently there are folk working on the passenger pigeon and the sabre-toothed tiger, so while dinosaurs might be out we could at some point see formerly-extinct species revived through the unholy artsscience.

(For those interested, the article is here.)

'Close to one in three - sorry, one in eight - SMEs are software pirates'

Unless they've got some solid statistical backing for that info which they're willing to make public (in suitably anonymised form) then their numbers will be treated with suspicion because the BSA's agenda derives entirely from the continued problem of piracy. They're hardly likely to come out and say "Turns out hardly anyone pirates anything any more, and there's really no reason for us to continue to exist", are they?

Maggie Thatcher: The Iron Lady who saved us from drab Post Office mobes

Better yet, in several cases the privatisation strategy decided that keeping the money within the national economy wasn't important so they sold them off to foreign owners, meaning that the profits derived from said companies are flowing out of the UK economy. Which is just excellent. (Source: http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/02/soaring-rail-profits-are-used-to-cut-fares-abroad-3567491/)

Privatisation, in theory and if enacted correctly, can let us all benefit from competition. The problem is that privatising infrastructure on which we all depend and which we cannot allow to fail is a tricky business, and the Post Office is a great example of how, when done wrong, there's a net degradation of service in many areas while costs continue to increase.

Library ebooks must SELF-DESTRUCT if scribes want dosh - review

It's good to see that publishers have learned from recent history that introducing technological constrains on new media to enforce old licencing schemes always works and absolutely never backfires in a way that promotes growth of pirated content....

Oh, wait.

I like books. I spend a silly amount of money on the things. I also borrow books from my library. I want to give any publisher who thinks that expiring ebooks is a genuinely good idea a ding round the ear, because if they think that they're obviously thinking with the wrong organ and need a hard reset to their thinking organ.

I've no problem with the idea of extending the public lending right to ebooks - if it makes sense for physical media, it makes sense for digital media. But holding digital media to artificial constraints that don't apply simply to facilitate an outdated licencing scheme is a stupid idea, and should be treated as such.

Torygraph and Currant Bun stand by to repel freeloaders

Re: BBC for the headlines @Ledswinger

@El Presidente

That's great, until you factor in the notion of whisteblowers. And whether or not you think they're needed very often, it's not necessarily a net improvement to the world to make it impossible for someone to report dodgy dealings or actions without effectively standing up and saying "I, Joe Bloggs of 123 Fake Street, would like to bring to your attention the following criminal *ack ack argh*", shortly followed by a takedown notice on the basis that the post is defamatory and a news story a couple of days later about how Joe Bloggs of 123 Fake Street has been found dead with two bullet holes in the back of his skull, and the police believe it to be suicide, and Definitely Not Shady At All.

I do think that an awful lot of comment sections would be improved if the very small but non-zero probability existed that saying something objectionable might get you a real-world kick in the danglies. (But then, who gets to define "objectionable"? Back to square zero...)

Given that Andrew tends to have an agenda in this area, it would probably have been a good idea to link to some actual numbers to substantiate the "circulation is up since implementing the paywall" claim, rather than showing a screenshot of the Sunday circulation figures.

It's not hard - in ten seconds or so, I found this article discussing the NYT's circulation along with those of other papers.

I won't say I'm necessarily delighted to see this happen, but I'm glad that a more rational model has arisen for the continued existence of newspapers. It makes sense to at least try and get some money in from readers. Though I wouldn't object if certain broadband tariffs included a fee that would be kicked back to newspaper publishers in exchange for access to their content....

iPads in education: Not actually evil, but pretty close

Re: Kensington Lock?

Nah, Apple have decided those are aesthetically unpleasing. Besides which, allowing you to lock up your expensive new iDevice deprives Apple of the profits from your replacement when it gets stolen deprives you of the privilege of visiting an Apple Store and buying a replacement if your original were to unfortunately be stolen.

Stephen Fry explains… Alan Turing's amazing computer

Re: The idea is...

@Destroy All Monsters

Thank you for attempting to explain the issue. (My comment appearing directly below yours was in fact intended for Andrew, not yourself).

As I understand your post, the issue then is that Turing's Universal Machine is not the first example of a universal symbol processing machine? And/or that the Universal Machine is a hypothetical machine rather than an actual piece of engineering?

It would greatly help your odds of not coming across like a condescending bellend if you'd explain why you believe that to be the case here.

I may be having a stupid moment, but wasn't the entire point of Turing's Universal Machine precisely as described by Fry, ie that it's a generalised framework on which a specific program can be run to solve a specific problem rather than building problem-specific hardware which can only ever solve one type of problem? I mean, ok, perhaps he should have stressed that the Universal Machine was the idealised version of the programmable computer, but that seems a pretty flimsy reason to have a go. Not that I expect ironclad reasoning when it comes to El Reg looking for chances to have a go at Fry...

Another MYSTERY evacuation: Google UK empties swanky offices

Re: I realise Google are crap at anything to do with customer service...

@Baudwalk

What part of "informing their employees about why things go tits up." involves telling someone at The Register about it?

Lenovo: Windows 8 is so good, everyone wants Windows 7

Re: Was it just TIFKAM as this is easily replaced/avoided with the right add-ons

@Tom 13

You're missing the point, I think. Which is that people hate change, period. (I remember hating XP because 2K was fine. I remember hating Vista rather more so, because by then I was accustomed to XP and it was fine. I remember disliking 7 for a bit, too. And I remember hating 8. In computing "New interfaces" means "new pain in the arse stuff to learn your way around", regardless of platform - just look at all the Unity/GNOME3/KDE4 stuff doing the rounds for proof that the penguinistas don't necessarily have it any better. One of these days, someone'll fuck about with the look & feel of XFCE and then we're all screwed.) But anyway - in the absence of Windows 365, Microsoft depends on regularly changing the OS version (and UI) sold on new computers to make money. So the joy for us in the field is to navigate this crap as best we can.

You and I are in firm agreement that TIFKAM is a bit silly on non-touch devices. However, after forcing myself to get to grips with it, I can say with confidence that if you're willing to spend a little time at the start of the machine's life getting the Start UI into a configuration that's useful to you (because the default configuration is worse than friggin' useless, and God knows how it got approved as is) and learn a couple of keyboard shortcuts, it's very straightforward to use. Seriously. I mostly spend my time on the desktop forgetting that I'm using Win8 unless I need to get at the settings on the system - for running applications, it may as well be 7.

If you don't want to do that, well, it takes less time to install ClassicShell and force the appearance of Windows 7 onto the thing than to do just about any of the other stuff you still need to do on any new Windows install ever releases, and you get something you're happy with.

Yes, I know, ideally you'd have a "enable Classic UI" button instead, but we're talking about perhaps 150 seconds of your life. You and I have both spent longer than that writing individual posts on the subject around here. Perhaps it's time to agree that it just isn't that big a deal? Or, if you genuinely think it is that big a deal, communicate this to MS in a meaningful way. Because I guarantee that "What those tossers moan about on the El Reg forum" will never be incorporated as part of feedback or UAT at MS. Politely-worded emails, on the other hand...

Re: More proof...

@Longrod_von_Hugendong (Now there's a username that doth protest too much...)

I wouldn't go making bets on that just yet; if it's large corporates we're talking about, anything bar the Surface Pro won't even be getting a look at Win8 for 12-18 months at the earliest. That's just the speed at which corporates roll. To pretend otherwise is to admit you've never worked support in one and don't really know of which you speak.

Even if the UI does prove to be a serious point of contention regarding the adoption of 8 within the corporate environment, Server 2012 is proving very popular so far with those who're testing it, and from what I've seen myself the improvements made to Hyper-V alone make it worthwhile. So between that and things like Windows To Go, I don't think it's quite as straightforward as the "irrefutable turd in punchbowl" story you'd like to have us all believe. Of course, I say this as one who finds Win8 at the desktop straightforward to use (who'd have thought, you learn some new keyboard shortcuts and it's just fine, same as every other version of Windows at the desktop) so feel free to disregard everything I say...

If any of you are trying to tell me that large enterprises purchase their OSs as preinstalled OEM versions rather than rolled-in-house images based on a volume-licenced Enterprise edition, I question the assertion that you've got even half the minimum required amount of clue concerning how enterprise IT operates to be participating in this conversation.

This entire article reads to me like an attempt to claim that Win8 has failed in the enterprise, when the reality is that only the tablet editions will even have a look-in at the enterprise level for the time being. It's going to be at least another couple of years before any sane enterprise considers migrating to Win8 at the desktop, just as it would have been at the same point in Win7's lifespan, or Vista's, or XP's, or 2K's.

Congratulations, copyright infringers: You are the five per cent

Re: OK, case study....

@moiety 16:07

I'm really not so sure what you say is valid. Only the printing and shipping stuff is physically-specific; everything else pertains to both dead-tree and no-tree versions. I've seen what you get when people try to skimp on the copy-editing, proofing or layout sections and it substantially devalues the end product.

I'm wary of the assumption that the cost of providing hosting and bandwidth for ebook distribution (especially anything that might contain an abundance of high res images like tech manuals or education-oriented textbooks) would automatically be negligible compared to shipping, particularly since at this point the ebook sales model means that actually admitting you are charging your customer an "electronic delivery charge" of any kind is unacceptable. And with 200+ppi screens becoming more and more commonplace, larger filesizes and greater-resolution images will become the norm, so it's not something that'll go away.

Consider the dead-tree equivalent of your argument re: " sunk costs). Most of the production process isn't in the printing or shipping side; it's in the author's advance, editing, proofing, scheduling and marketing the book. Once you get to the point where a second print run can be justified, the only sunk costs are printing and shipping - this is why paperback editions are feasible even though their profit margins are much lower than initial hardback runs. But not every book gets as far as a second print run, especially not in the "niche" genres like "not paranormal romance" or "stuff that Oprah Winfrey hasn't promoted" or "stuff that doesn't count amongst the 3 books WH Smiths customers buy per year".

The sunk cost to produce an ebook version worth a damn is non-trivial (hence my reference to Stross' post, which I found eye-opening when I first read it) and has to be amortized against a given number of sales of that ebook before future sales are gravy with only distribution costs to offset. Even if the distribution costs are lower per book, they're still not zero, and I am willing to bet money that no profit-making publisher will view the return on the sale of a single copy of an ebook as, in itself, enough to cover the costs of producing it. That's simply not how breaking even works.

Re: OK, case study....

@Graham

Here you go: http://xkcd.com/488/. It talks about audiobooks, but the principle applies across all media that can be digitized, really.

If it's only 5% they're bloody lucky, I'd say. I would have estimated it as more like 10%, with far more again being willing to pay a reasonable price and pirating when that's not an option.

The rise in legal useful services in the UK will almost certainly be a factor here, but as a film and music enthusiast who uses everything from Amazon through emusic to Bandcamp to get music and Netflix/Lovefilm through Film4OD/CurzonOnDemand for home viewing, I maintain the opinion that if I've checked half a dozen services and accounts to try and legally get at the product I'm seeking and the rightsholders have decided that I shouldn't be allowed paid access to it, then they lose nothing if I end up getting it elsewhere. (EG I'd happily pay up to £10 just for streaming access to Sky Atlantic, but Sky won't let me get that unless I switch to them as a provider - so they can sit and swivel, and those content creators who decided that giving Sky the exclusive rights to their contents get money from me only when they release their stuff on DVD. It's a net loss for all of us, but if they will insist on being bloody stupid there's only so much I can do....)

I happily pay for content, but I don't understand what sane individual would think that there's a difference between "Captain Underpants, in the UK, watches DL copy of eg current Big Bang Theory episodes, then buys boxset of that season 6 months later when it's released" and "Captain Underpants, in the UK, waits until that boxset is released 6 months after broadcast and buys it when it's released". They get the same money, at the same time, in both cases. If they want my money sooner, the way to do it is to give me DRM free access to paid-for episode downloads, at a reasonable price. The music industry eventually accepted this and, surprise surprise, is now reporting steady increases in digital music sales. I look forward to the day that the film and tv industry catch up.